aleatory since 1999

August 30, 2007

Rewilding North America?!

Elephants might graze upon the Great Plains, stalked again by lions. Camels might wander parts of the American Southwest. And cheetahs might once again chase after pronghorn antelope.

While I realize that monkeys might also fly out of my butt, I do so love the notion that we might one day be able to trade our global fear of imminent ecological collapse for the much more personal, rational, and managable fear of being eaten.

August 15, 2007

Colossal Cave Adventure

“Section 2 of this article is a formal examination of Crowther’s original source code files, offering, for the first time, a clear understanding of Crowther’s innovative blend of simulation and fantasy, as well as a better appreciation of the creative contributions of Woods. Section 3 compares the game to maps of the cave site, presents photographs of an excursion to Colossal Cave, and offers testimony from experienced cavers. These key sources – the code and the cave, analyzed here for the first time – establish that Crowther’s original was not only faithful to the geography of the real Colossal Cave, but was also a fantasy remediation of that site.”

August 13, 2007

iPhone photograhy

August 11, 2007

We will! We will Spock you!

Struggle. He had a Vulcan father and a human mother — so there’s great logic and deep emotion and a great struggle between the two poles. That’s a great gift to hand an actor. It’s a struggle we all go through.

Mr. Hoogestraat, virtual adulterer

August 8, 2007

i hope someday you'll join us

The piano on which John Lennon composed "Imagine," his famous ode to peace and healing, is on a yearlong magical mystery tour of the U.S. with a macabre twist.

The nutmeg-colored Steinway upright, believed to have been in Mr. Lennon's country home in Ascot, England, is crisscrossing the country to show up at some of the nation's most horrific sites of violence, death and destruction.

August 6, 2007

song

the mississippi project

This summer, four of us college students are going to paddle the length of the Mississippi River in two canoes. North to South, headwaters to delta, we are going to travel the 2,000+ miles from the Minnesota top to the Katrina-ravaged bottom. We might ride barges part of the way; we might hitchhike. At some point we will need to get back to school. But however it works out, that is our plan. We have no particular reasons for doing this.

james tate

Do you know anything about [lemurs]? They’re just fabulous. They’re the most wonderful primates imaginable. They’re only in Madagascar and they’re endangered like most things, you know. The people cut down forests, killing them because they have superstitions about them because they have these long fingers that they point and the natives think that means [you’re] going to die, if they point at you. But [they’re] very, very gentle creatures. They constantly hug each other. They have these long, long tails. Anyway, no, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this. I’m a normal person who happens to like animals a lot. I don’t want to get too self-conscious about how they get in my poems because that’ll, you know, stop me.

“The List of Famous Hats”. I drank a lot of wine one night and called James Tate’s home number (through 411; this was before Google was integral to my life) and left a message on his answering machine telling him how funny this poem is.

The Kingdom of the Happy Land

I think it’s important, even now, to look at the ways African-American people tried to carve out a place for themselves in the Reconstruction period. It took an enormous amount of imagination and courage to do that, and it’s something people need to know and understand.

The Kingdom of the Happy Land was a community founded by freed slaves in the western Carolinas mountains at the end of the Civil War. What remains is a small pile of stones, the remnants of a chimney.